An Electronic Soundtrack for Spiritual Awakening

Jon Hopkins makes gentle music with hidden depths.

A decade ago, in the spring of 2008, Coldplay released an album with a grand title and a grander purpose. The title was “Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends.” The purpose was to transform Coldplay, which was just about the most popular band in the world—and just about the most reviled, too. To facilitate this transformation, the members had recruited Brian Eno, the legendary producer and electronic composer. Chris Martin, the singer, told MTV that he was intent on “breaking down” the band’s musical identity and “trying to build something different, and hopefully better.” But if the album was a revolution it was a mild one. “Viva la Vida” began with a collection of chiming, flickering sounds, unobtrusive at first but slowly growing louder, as a hummable tune revealed itself. A critic for the Daily Telegraphcalled this introduction “spine-tinglingly beautiful.” Others, less impressed, suggested that it evoked the similarly atmospheric opening of another album produced by Eno: “The Joshua Tree,” by U2.

In fact, the introduction was the work not of Eno but of his collaborator Jon Hopkins, a previously obscure musician who had allowed Coldplay to use an unreleased track of his. In return, the band brought Hopkins on tour as the opening act, which gave him a chance to play his electronic compositions to arena crowds. Hopkins signed to the discerning indie label Domino, and in 2009 he released “Insides,” which included a nine-minute version of the track that Coldplay borrowed. Instead of building into a cheerful rock song, it melted into a series of slow arpeggios and eventually faded away. The album was warm and meticulous, full of graceful crackles and chimes, and it inspired a chorus of acclaim that has been building ever since.

Hopkins is now thirty-eight, and one of the most celebrated electronic musicians of his generation. He has a paradoxical ability to make obsessively engineered tracks that sound friendly and generous; his sensibility is openhearted and sometimes sentimental—an approach that can make him seem like an outlier in the world of electronic music. Hopkins is known for his collaborations and soundtracks and, above all, his own albums, which appear every five years or so and then reappear on innumerable best-of lists. Next month, he will release “Singularity,” ending a quiet but dramatic period in his life, during which he recovered from the rigors of touring by subjecting his body to other kinds of stress: desert treks, controlled breathing, freezing baths. Apparently, these exertions had an effect, because the new album is both the gentlest and the most epic of Hopkins’s career.

“Singularity” is an hour-long ode to spiritual transcendence that also resembles pleasant background noise—at least, it does at first. The album includes a handful of wispy, beatless tracks that might be considered ambient music, a genre that Eno invented. In the liner notes to “Ambient 1: Music for Airports,” from 1978, Eno wrote that ambient music “must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” Hopkins has been pleased to learn that his albums have generally failed to meet this exacting standard. “Someone will say, I went to do some cooking and put it on, and ended up sitting down and listening to the whole thing,” he says. “Obviously, that’s what you want—you’ve captured them.”

Just as older generations of musicians were seduced by the electric guitar, Hopkins, as a boy, was seduced by the Roland TB-303, the synthesizer whose squelchy, serrated sound defined the genre known as acid house. He grew up outside London, studying the piano and, at night, studying the pirate radio stations that played mysterious records by unknown producers. He remembers being captivated by “Acperience 1,” an influential 1992 track that layered surging, menacing Roland bass lines to create nine minutes of dance-floor disorientation. (It was, Hopkins eventually learned, the work of a German duo called Hardfloor.) But he was drawn, too, to the sturdy melodies of pop. At eighteen, he was hired as the touring keyboard player for the venturesome pop singer Imogen Heap, a job that led to work as a session musician. On the side, Hopkins made a pair of pretty but rather drowsy solo albums, which were widely ignored, with one important exception: Eno heard the second one, “Contact Note,” and invited Hopkins to his studio. They worked together on that Coldplay album and, along with another musician, Leo Abrahams, on the score for “The Lovely Bones,” as well as on a collaborative album that appeared in 2010, which took the form of fifteen transient clouds of sound.

In the years since the twinned revolutions of house and techno, in the nineteen-eighties, “electronic music” has often been synonymous with “dance music.” But Hopkins had his formative encounters with tracks like “Acperience 1” in his bedroom, sitting around with friends, entranced. In his early work, rhythm sometimes seems to be an afterthought: his first two albums often relied on slouchy, hip-hop-inspired beats that can sound generic. “Insides,” his Domino début, marked a new beginning: Hopkins built stiffer, quicker beats, to draw out the unease that lurked within his seemingly serene compositions. “Immunity,” from 2013, was even more propulsive. It was a reflection of Hopkins’s growing friendship with a cohort of like-minded electronic producers, including Kieran Hebden (who records as Four Tet) and Nathan Fake. It also reflected Hopkins’s life as an increasingly popular producer and occasional d.j., which gave him a new appreciation for the fine art of moving crowds. His electronic music had become dance music, too.

Then, having finally found a home in night clubs, Hopkins defected. He moved to Los Angeles, learned to meditate, and made spiritual pilgrimages into the California desert. (“It sounds funny, because everyone does that, but there’s a reason why everyone does that,” he says.) While listening to a podcast by Joe Rogan, the erudite comedian and mixed-martial-arts announcer, he discovered Wim Hof, a Dutch wellness coach who is sometimes called the Iceman, because he trains disciples to withstand freezing temperatures by regulating their bodies, using a technique that entails induced hyperventilation. Hopkins says that making electronic music is more physically demanding than it looks—all those years spent crouched over his laptop had damaged his back. As his body got stronger and his mind got calmer, Hopkins started to think anew about what kind of music he wanted to make. Some early demos had been heavy and distorted, reflecting his anxiety about the state of the world. Now he was less interested in evoking that anxiety than in finding a way to leave it behind. The acid-house scene that Hopkins loved was associated with a druggy, wide-eyed spirituality; this tradition is easy to mock, but Hopkins found compelling ways to revive it, without apology and without irony. The centerpiece of “Singularity” is “Everything Connected,” a grand techno track that lasts more than ten minutes, building and disintegrating and eventually giving way to “Feel First Life,” a wordless choral postlude that sounds distinctly devotional.

Hopkins works hard to make his music sound simple. In composing “Singularity,” he switched software, from Logic to Ableton, which gives him even more fine-grained control over timbre, and a single song might often contain more than a hundred individual tracks, carefully mixed to create an illusion of emptiness. (When he performs live, Hopkins uses devices called Kaoss Pads, which let him trigger sounds and effects by tapping and rubbing a series of screens; he moves his fingers with the delicacy of a concert pianist.) Although dance music is built on repetition, he finds ways to make sure that listeners don’t feel as if they were being pummelled by machines. The most infectious beats on “Immunity” are slightly but insistently asymmetrical—he made the rhythms more human by hobbling them a bit. And “Singularity” is full of familiar-sounding chord progressions arranged in irregular patterns, so that you are never quite sure when the next change is coming. You can relax into these tracks without ever feeling that you have them figured out.

A generation ago, part of the appeal of electronic music was its mysteriousness; Hopkins was far from the only young listener intrigued by hard-to-find records, made by faceless producers using obscure technology. Nowadays, streaming services make it easier than ever to consume music: one track at a time, or in never-ending playlists. Hopkins’s work is accessible enough to be used in a variety of ways, which means that many people hear it without seeking it out. On Spotify, it is regularly featured on popular playlists such as “Music for Concentration” and “Sleep,” mixed in with compositions by avant-garde heroes, like Aphex Twin, and intentionally generic tracks that seem to exist only on Spotify—the musical equivalent of supermarket brands.

Many of the most thrilling current producers—from Daniel Lopatin, who records as Oneohtrix Point Never, to the emerging London-based composer known as Klein—make music that echoes the queasy, twitchy sensation of life online. By comparison, Hopkins’s version of minimalism marks him as a classicist, whose musical experiments often find elegant ways to update the old templates of house and techno. And when it comes to musical consumption Hopkins is even more old-fashioned: he likes to make hour-long albums, reasoning that there will always be some people who can be compelled to listen to them straight through.

The tracks on “Singularity” flow into each other, as a reward for anyone who takes the trouble to play them in order. The second half consists mainly of textures and melodies, not rhythms, as if Hopkins were giving casual listeners permission to space out, or to forget about him altogether. Then, near the end, comes “Luminous Beings,” which is a dance track but a placid one. It whirrs and clicks for a minute before the beat arrives, and then some broken chords, which are precisely layered to create an ever-changing cadence. The mood is artfully ambiguous. Some listeners might imagine glowing lights above a dance floor, near closing time. Others might picture the pattern created by morning sun, beaming through a window onto a bedroom floor. Still others might picture nothing at all, having found a different way to pay tribute to the soft power of Hopkins’s creations: by drifting off to sleep. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the April 30, 2018, issue, with the headline “Dancing in Your Head.”